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September 10 - October 14, 2019
solution to this problem is to rotate troops out of battle for periodic rest and recuperation—this is standard policy in most Western armies—but this is not always possible in combat.
into insanity?
Wrong term, and overly used by the author. "Insanity" is generalized and taps into the basest fears that people have of the mentally ill; it perpetuates stereotypes and doesn't look at the reality of functioning mental illness which is so many people's lives.
The Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit asked Israeli soldiers immediately after combat what most frightened them. The answer that he expected was “loss of life” or “injury and abandonment in the field.” He was therefore surprised to discover the low emphasis on fear of bodily harm and death, and the great emphasis on “letting others down.”
Tim O'Brien, The Things they Carried
fear of death and injury is not the primary cause of psychiatric casualties on the battlefield.
it is instead the fear of not being able to meet the terrible obligations of combat that weighs most heavily on the minds of combat soldiers.
The supplied, accepted, comfortable name for this beast is “fear.”
insanity.
STOP
In most circumstances in which nonkillers are faced with the threat of death and injury in war, the instances of psychiatric casualties are notably absent.
Not true
This strategic bombing of population centers was motivated by quite reasonable expectations of mass psychiatric casualties resulting from the strategic bombing of civilian populations.
Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale.
Indeed, bombing seemed to have served primarily to harden the hearts and empower the killing ability of the nations that endured it.
insanity
prisoners of war did not suffer psychiatric reactions when they were subjected to artillery attack or aerial bombardment, but their guards did.
combatants will try to get out of the battle (a situation where they are required to kill) even when it puts them at risk.
The prisoners were unarmed, impotent, and strangely at peace with their lot in life. They had no personal capacity or responsibility to kill, and they had no reason to believe that the incoming artillery or bombs were a personal matter. The guards, on the other hand, took the matter as a personal affront. They still had a capacity and a responsibility to fight, and they were faced with the irrefutable evidence that someone was intent on killing them and that they had a responsibility to do likewise.
unbearable responsibility inherent in their roles as soldiers.
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, psychiatric casualties during naval warfare have been nearly nonexistent.
Modern sailors suffer and burn and die just as horribly as their land-bound equivalents. Death and destruction fall all about them. Yet they do not crack. Why? The answer is, again, that most of them don’t have to kill anyone directly, and no one is trying to specifically, personally, kill them.
the intervention of distance and machinery between them and the enemy.
The psychologically protective power of (1) hitting a precise, known objective, (2) conducting such exact rehearsals and visualizations prior to combat (a form of conditioning), and (3) attacking an enemy who is caught by surprise and will hopefully have little chance to fight back is tremendous.
the extremely rare “natural soldiers” who are most capable of killing (those identified by Swank and Marchand as the 2 percent predisposed toward aggressive psychopathic tendencies) can be found “mostly congregating in the commando-type special forces [units].
go mad
they are not obligated to engage in face-to-face aggressive activities against the enemy.
The medic takes not his courage from anger. He runs the same or greater risks of death and injury, but he, or she, is given over on the battlefield not to Thanatos and anger, but to kindness and Eros.
The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty, privation and want are the school of the good soldier. —Napoleon
The point of such remarkable exercises in self-flagellation is to introduce the combat leader to an intense degree of stress and thereby inoculate him against psychological trauma.
The four factors of (1) physiological arousal caused by the stress of existing in what is commonly understood as a continual fight-or-flight-arousal condition, (2) cumulative loss of sleep, (3) the reduction in caloric intake, and (4) the toll of the elements—such as rain, cold, heat, and dark of night—assaulting the soldier all combine to form the “state of prolonged and great fatigue” that is the Weight of Exhaustion.
Usually these two systems sustain a general balance between their demands upon the body’s resources, but during extremely stressful circumstances the fight-or-flight response kicks in and the sympathetic nervous system mobilizes all available energy for survival. In combat this very often results in nonessential activities such as digestion, bladder control, and sphincter control being completely shut down. This process is so intense that soldiers very often suffer stress diarrhea, and it is not at all uncommon for them to urinate and defecate in their pants as the body literally “blows its
...more
This parasympathetic backlash occurs as soon as the danger and the excitement is over, and it takes the form of an incredibly powerful weariness and sleepiness on the part of the soldier.
how soldiers become physiologically and psychologically incapacitated by the parasympathetic backlash that occurs as soon as the momentum of the attack has halted and the soldier briefly believes himself to be safe.
Maybe why so many rape victims don't report until much later, if at all
Unable to flee, and unable to overcome the danger through a brief burst of fighting, posturing, or submission, the bodies of modern soldiers quickly exhaust their capacity to energize and they slide into a state of profound physical and emotional exhaustion of such a magnitude and dimension that it appears to be almost impossible to communicate it to those who have not experienced it.
that lack of food constitutes the single biggest assault upon morale…. Apart from its purely chemical effects upon the body, it has woeful effects upon the mind.”
Poverty - root cause of mental illness, violence
Henri Barbusse to write that “dampness rusts men like rifles, more slowly but more deeply.”
the combat soldier appears to feel a deep sense of responsibility and accountability for what he sees around him.
Often you can keep these things out of your mind when you are young and active, but they come back to haunt your nights in your old age.
Tim O'Brien -- The Things They Carried (stories in book from perspective of older O'Brien)
Simply confronting the boss about a promotion or a raise is one of the most stressful
and upsetting things most people can ever bring themselves to do, and many never even get that far. Facing down the school bully or confronting a hostile acquaintance is something that most will avoid at all costs. Many medical authorities believe that it is the constant hostility and lack of acceptance that they must face—and the resulting stress—that are responsible for the dramatic rate of high blood pressure in African Americans.
We want desperately to be liked, loved, and in control of our lives; and intentional, overt, human hostility and aggression—more than anything else in life—assaults our self-image, our sense of control, our sense of the world as a meaningful and comprehensible place, and, ultimately, our mental and physical health.
Monica's treatment of Haley
In rape the psychological harm usually far exceeds the physical injury. The trauma of rape, like that of combat, involves minimal fear of
death or injury; far more damaging is the impotence, shock, and horror in being so hated and despised as to be debased and abused by a fellow human being.
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. —Victor Frankl, Nazi concentration-camp survivor
those in concentration camps had to face aggression and death on a highly personal, face-to-face basis.
in the death camps it was starkly, horribly personal. Victims of this horror had to look the darkest, most loathsome depths of human hatred in the eye. There was no room for denial, and the only escape was more madness.
The soldier’s response to the overtly hostile actions of the enemy is usually one of profound shock, surprise, and outrage.
The potential of close-up, inescapable, interpersonal hatred and aggression is more effective and has greater impact on the morale of the soldier than the presence of inescapable, impersonal death and destruction.
“learned helplessness.
Combining an understanding of (a) those factors that cause combat trauma with (b) an understanding of the inoculation process permits us to recognize that in most of these military schools the inoculation is specifically oriented toward hate.
Faced with the soldier’s encounters with horror, guilt, fear, exhaustion, and hate, each man draws steadily from his own private reservoir of inner strength and fortitude until finally the well runs dry. And then he becomes just another statistic.
Exhaustion, memory defects, apathy, hopelessness, and all the rest of these are precise descriptions of clinical depression that can be taken straight from the DSM.
Lord Moran noted that “a few men had the stuff of leadership in them, they were like rafts to which all the rest of humanity clung for support and hope.”
